# Exploring Gender Bias in Large Language Models: An In-depth Dive into the German Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16557 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16557/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06520/) (2016)
- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09456/) (2020)
- [CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00133/) (2020)
- [BBQ: A Hand-Built Bias Benchmark for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08193/) (2021)
- [Bias and Fairness in Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00770/) (2023)
- [The Woman Worked as a Babysitter: On Biases in Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01326/) (2019)
- [Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09301/) (2018)
- [Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09457/) (2017)
- [BOLD: Dataset and Metrics for Measuring Biases in Open-Ended Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11718/) (2021)
- [Persistent Anti-Muslim Bias in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05783/) (2021)
- [Identifying and Reducing Gender Bias in Word-Level Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03035/) (2019)
- [Gender Bias in Contextualized Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03310/) (2019)
- [Social Biases in NLP Models as Barriers for Persons with Disabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00813/) (2020)
- [RedditBias: A Real-World Resource for Bias Evaluation and Debiasing of Conversational Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03521/) (2021)
- [Reducing Sentiment Bias in Language Models via Counterfactual Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03064/) (2019)
- [Intrinsic Bias Metrics Do Not Correlate with Application Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15859/) (2020)
- [Black is to Criminal as Caucasian is to Police: Detecting and Removing Multiclass Bias in Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04047/) (2019)
- [Assessing Social and Intersectional Biases in Contextualized Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01485/) (2019)
- [UnQovering Stereotyping Biases via Underspecified Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02428/) (2020)
- [Evaluating the Underlying Gender Bias in Contextualized Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08783/) (2019)
- [Large Language Models are Geographically Biased](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02680/) (2024)
- [Unmasking Contextual Stereotypes: Measuring and Mitigating BERT's Gender Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14534/) (2020)
- [Hurtful Words: Quantifying Biases in Clinical Contextual Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11515/) (2020)
- ["Call me sexist, but...": Revisiting Sexism Detection Using Psychological Scales and Adversarial Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12764/) (2020)
- [Debiasing isn't enough! -- On the Effectiveness of Debiasing MLMs and their Social Biases in Downstream Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02938/) (2022)
- [On Evaluating and Mitigating Gender Biases in Multilingual Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01503/) (2023)
- [On the Independence of Association Bias and Empirical Fairness in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10153/) (2023)
- [Challenges in Measuring Bias via Open-Ended Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11601/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Still Exhibit Bias in Long Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17519/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Failure of contextual invariance in large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23485/) (2026)
- [MOSAIC: Unveiling the Moral, Social and Individual Dimensions of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00048/) (2026)
- [Beyond Surface Cues: Disentangling Sociocultural Signals in Multilingual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23026/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, various methods have been proposed to evaluate gender bias in large language models (LLMs). A key challenge lies in the transferability of bias measurement methods initially developed for the English language when applied to other languages. This work aims to contribute to this research strand by presenting five German datasets for gender bias evaluation in LLMs. The datasets are grounded in well-established concepts of gender bias and are accessible through multiple methodologies. Our findings, reported for eight multilingual LLM models, reveal unique challenges associated with gender bias in German, including the ambiguous interpretation of male occupational terms and the influence of seemingly neutral nouns on gender perception. This work contributes to the understanding of gender bias in LLMs across languages and underscores the necessity for tailored evaluation frameworks.